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How is Telecom industry using AI for powering experience economy?

By : Nitin Goel

Sr. Consultant – Analytics & Consulting

Consumers in digital world are not going to be happy with just the product or service you are offering, rather they seek and expect additional utility in the form of experience. As per IDC report, almost two third of the enterprises are investing in AI systems to deliver this personalised customer experience. And with increasing market volatility and ever-changing customer expectations shaping today’s digital economy, telecom organisations need to pace-up their AI adoption to drive home the advantage through intelligent digital customer engagement.

Customer experience translates to monetary value for enterprises in this digital world. Product and service economy is giving way to the ‘experience economy’, where bargaining power has tilted decisively to customers. AI will potentially have its say in how enterprises will shape up in this experience economy.

AI to unlock ‘data driven’ experience

The growing digital footprint of consumers leaves behind a huge amount of data trail. It is impossible for humans to analyse data at such scale to make sense out of it.

Artificial Intelligence can help Telecom Enterprises to learn from data continuously, and profile consumers more holistically and analyse their usage behavior much deeper. The insights discovered through this will help them in making tactical decisions like choosing the best suited offers.

With the advancements in analytics and artificial intelligence, telecom enterprises can go further and even predict the propensity of a consumer to buy a product. This includes knowing not just the optimum price for a customised offering but also the probability of it getting accepted by the customer.

AI to deliver ‘contextually relevant’ experience

Today’s customers think and act in real time. To understand the customer needs, telecoms are betting on AI to understand the context of the customer better. A customer might call the customer care for a query related to international calls or might end up visiting a customer care center for the same interaction. Naturally the expectation is that customer will get same response over these channels and a speedy action in meeting his needs. AI ensures this for the telecom enterprises as it can enable real-time decision making at the moment of relevance itself.

Using AI and predictive data analytics, operators can identify and push various services to the customers at the right time, for e.g. – in case of post-paid customers, operators must encourage high speed data services and offer tailored data packs when subscriber is running low on data. The timing of offering tailored packages based on customer intelligence plays a critical role here.

AI to enable ‘personalised’ experience

In today’s digital world, customers expect a lot and their expectations are not only limited to great service, they demand personalised experience every time they connect to your brand. Telcos are now leveraging AI-based analytical and machine learning techniques to analyse historical and contextual data and understand each customer’s persona and intent in real-time. This helps them to recommend right offers, services and content on different touch points, thus creating a consistent and personalised touch point experience.

AI also plays a significant role in subscriber profiling that helps in extending custom offers to subscribers based on their specific needs, at the right time. AI-powered analytics can help operators to learn customer’s intangible aspirations and converting them into most suited tangible product through psychometric profiling. For example converting a secondary SIM user into a primary SIM user because of his high (read unlimited) voice & data needs or converting a data only or a voice only user to a hybrid user.

AI to ensure ‘non-intrusive’ seamless experience

Repetition and redundancy of offers extended to customers can be minimised through AI. If consumer buying behavior suggests an appropriate time period for conversion and if the product is still not bought within this period, it may not be advisable to push the offer again. In such situations, buying propensity models can be leveraged to determine how aggressively and frequently we can extend offers. AI also can ensure experience is seamless across devices, contexts, touch points as it enables quickly deriving insights/foresights from data and acting on them in real quick time.

AI adoption to surge ahead

IDC’s research has stated that the forward-thinking telecom companies are already investing big in AI technologies. And AI is increasingly being adopted to improve marketing efficiency, support business innovation and generate new revenue streams. Across the organisations and industry verticals, the ultimate goal is always enhancing the customer experience and that is what matters the most in this ‘experience economy’.